Linear design is a popular design trend, particularly for SaaS products. Has it peaked already? Yes, but unlike many design trends, it’s more likely to evolve from here rather than fade into obscurity, so it’s definitely worth learning about.
In this article you’ll learn what linear design is, what the benefits and problems are with linear design, and how to use linear design effectively — hopefully without appearing copy-paste and with a twist on your take.
Linear design is a design trend popularized by the SaaS product, Linear. Linear streamlines software development (or makes it more “linear,” if you will), but you’ll see this principle in the design of their website too, so the Linear design trend is named after the company Linear but also what appears to be their core principle:
Linear design began with the minimalization of UI design. The flat design trend evolved to include some smaller trends such as soft shadows, dark mode, bold typography, complex gradients, glassmorphism, and so on, which made user interfaces more aesthetic but still minimal. Linear design adds — unsurprisingly — linearity to this, which means being direct and offering minimal choices.
The main benefit of Linear design, as I hinted just now, is the reduced cognitive load. Having just one direction for your eyes to scan, a single subject matter to focus on, an orderly sequence of sections to follow, and so on makes products less overwhelming to use. This makes users less anxious and more productive, which equates to faster conversions and more conversions.
You can measure the impact of Linear design too — faster conversions would mean faster time to task completion and more conversions would mean higher conversion rate.
For some backstory on why the lack of linearity makes users anxious, it comes down to FOMO (fear of missing out) and slippery slope fallacy (fear of doing the wrong thing).
In addition, an underrated benefit of Linear design and minimalism overall is fewer bugs, increased performance, and faster development times. Because simplicity, right?
And yes, Linear design is also visually appealing. However, the appeal is starting to wear off due to oversaturation, which we’ll go into now.
The problem with using design trends such as Linear design is that they make products look samey if they become popular enough. As a design trend becomes more popular, the products using them become less visually appealing (perhaps even boring), and as you can imagine this makes them less enjoyable to use. The lack of a unique brand identity also makes them less memorable and less recognizable.
The trade-off of samey is better UX, because familiarity and consistency helps users to understand how a product works (even if they’ve never used it before) since they’re familiar with the UX patterns used (this obviously doesn’t apply to design trends that are purely decorative, though).
Naturally, there’s a sweet spot where people have become familiar with the design trend’s patterns and yet it continues to be interesting and visually appealing. However, that doesn’t appear to be the case here because people are starting to note that almost every SaaS website looks the same.
Does Linear design continue to do well? Yes, but it wouldn’t be future-proof in its current form if you were to implement it today. Something else will inevitably become more popular, probably sooner rather than later.
A quick Google search for UX design trends suggests that we’ll see bold typography, complex gradients, glassmorphism, commoditization of UX, and accessibility trending in 2024. But what’s interesting is that these are all qualities of Linear design, so there’s a good chance that design trends in the years to come will feel like the natural evolution of linear design — linear design but bolder and with more individuality. So what can we do to achieve that?
Let’s take a look.
Let’s take a look at the defining qualities of linear design and how to utilize them effectively, in particular to avoid creating designs with little originality.
Although the light mode vs. dark mode debate still rages on, the most obvious thing about Linear design is its focus on dark mode. There’s no real evidence to suggest that it’s better, but aesthetically it’s a fine choice to go with.
It’s commonly agreed upon that “100 percent black” is too black, but to be more specific I recommend using your brand color with 1–10 percent lightness to create harmony within your color palette:
But like I said, it’s mostly an aesthetic choice. You can utilize any other color palette to avoid looking samey while still utilizing linear design’s best qualities, which we’ll go into now:
Say what you mean — be bold, direct, and to avoid looking like a sheep in the herd, be creative with your typefaces. Bold typography is a staple of Linear design and modern web design in general, but the same old sans-serif typefaces are starting to look a little stale.
Being bold and then going even bolder will enable you to keep one of linear design’s best qualities while creating a fresh visual aesthetic that hasn’t been done to death:
Gradients are a great way to add faux details and more dimensions to a design without actually doing so, so you end up with more impact but not more clutter. Gradients can be as simple or as complex as your design allows (more content should equal simpler gradients), and if you want to add animation to those gradients, why not? Today’s web technology makes it easy and performant to do so, which is why you see a lot of animated gradients today!
This sub-trend has been coming and going for years; however, modern advancements in web technologies might mean that we’ll be seeing glassmorphism, which is essentially a sleek glass effect, more consistently.
The effect works right out of the box in most UI design tools now for the same reason, and it’s a great way to infuse detail with readability, as shown in the image below:
Glassmorphism is however very difficult to do differently, so using this effect can make your designs lack originality.
But most importantly and the best part of linear design in my opinion is of course its linearity, which can mean many things:
The State of UX lists the commoditization of UX as a design trend that we’ll see in 2024, but I think that UX design has been heading this way for a while now. They describe the commoditization of UX as the “focus on scalability and standardization over differentiation and delight”, which in a practical sense pretty much means going for whatever’s cheaper, faster, and has been proven to work over individuality and experience.
It’s a classic case of Pareto Principle (or “80 percent good” if you’re not familiar with the concept) and it makes perfect sense (pun not intended) from a business perspective. It’s not specifically a quality of Linear design, but doing ‘whatever works’ is definitely becoming a design trend in its own right and Linear design is perhaps living proof of that.
That being said, providing a fresh experience can keep customers/users engaged and award products with a competitive edge. Think about it — many SaaS products are used every day, so users become bored with them far quicker than they normally would with a product. It only takes one competitor to come along and build the exact same product functionally but with a better design.
So while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with “scalability and standardization” as UX Collective puts it, research on competitive advantage differentiators consistently shows that “differentiation and delight” can have a positive impact on product success.
To summarize this point, Linear design is great but there’s room for originality, too.
Accessibility should be at the forefront of your design process — always. However, it’s a natural byproduct of Linear design because simpler designs are easier to make accessible. If designed and developed mindfully, they might even be accessible right out of the box.
The Stark blog is a great place for designers and developers alike to learn about all aspects of accessibility, and it’s generally regarded as a crucial aspect of design anyway regardless of any design trends used.
The funny thing about design trends these days is that the trends themselves look samey. You could argue that, visually, Linear design is just flat design with dark mode and gradients.
Perhaps design overall is just becoming so minimalist (which is a great thing, by the way) that there isn’t much room to be inventive, which isn’t a great thing but I think we can all agree that great UX is better than great aesthetics. Or maybe we don’t agree? Drop your thoughts into the comment section below!
Either way, I think that there’s room to take the best parts of linear design (or any design trend) and fuse them with new ideas. On that note, I think that we’ve perhaps reached the conclusion of the design trends era. Going forward, I think web design and digital design in general will evolve more incrementally — we’ll see quality of life updates to Linear design (or whatever we end up calling future iterations of it) rather than wildly different design trends every year.
In my opinion, we should protect Linear design (especially its linearity) rather than look towards something that’s completely different just for the cheap thrills of having something new and fresh for a short while. I think for me personally, I’d just like to see more colors and typefaces instead of dark mode and sans-serif fonts. They might be commonly used with Linear design-inspired interfaces, but they aren’t what make Linear design great.
Thanks for reading!
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